Tuesday 30 November 2010 12.16 EST
First published on Tuesday 30 November 2010 12.16 EST

What training should a lawyer have, and how many people should be allowed to embark on it? The Legal Services Board chairman David Edmonds said recently that he constantly heard from both educationalists and practitioners that the current framework is "simply not fit for purpose". Whether this is actually the case will be the subject of the biggest review of legal education in 40 years, conducted jointly by the regulators of solicitors, barristers and legal executives.

Some of the problems they will address are well documented, such as what is widely regarded as the mismatch between the number of law students and number of available trainee positions, and the related question of whether an aptitude test should be used to ensure that those with little chance of succeeding in the law waste neither their time nor their money (student debt being another significant issue given the huge cost of legal training). Edmonds was not overly keen on such tests.

Interestingly, however, figures published by Professor Richard Moorhead of Cardiff Law School indicate that since the legal practice course (LPC) was introduced 15 years ago, the market has actually been "working generally pretty effectively" when the number of students is mapped against the number of training contracts. Furthermore, he reported last week that LPC enrolments have dropped by 20% this year, making the numbers, which got out of kilter over the past couple of years, much more balanced. The statistics also highlight the danger of relying on anecdote in reforming the training regime.

This is all against a background of a changing profession, where "general practitioners" are a dying breed as specialisation becomes the order of the day, where management skills and commercial awareness are must-haves, and where business models are far more diverse and will become even more so once alternative business structures come on stream next October.

As Edmonds put it in his set-piece Upjohn lecture to the Association of Law Teachers: "It was relatively easy to devise an education and training framework for a world where all lawyers ran their business in broadly the same way." There was also "greater uniformity in the skills and knowledge needed to practise successfully" than there is now.

A key wider issue is diversity; research recently found that lawyers are seven times as likely to have gone to private school when compared to the general population, the only surprise being that this figure was so low. The Solicitors Regulation Authority is already looking at more flexible pathways to qualification that open up opportunities to the widest pool of talent, while universities minister David Willetts, who has taken on responsibility for Alan Milburn's report on access to the professions, is said to be interested in non-graduate routes.

So what could some of the solutions be? Edmonds floated cutting the length of academic study as a way to reduce debt, as well as developing an accountancy-style training model of day-release for study while in employment (surprisingly he made no explicit reference to the legal executive route to qualification, which already provides a way to qualify as a lawyer without a degree by studying while working, and offers LPC graduates fast-track qualification).

There could be more tailored, specialist LPCs produced by removing some of the compulsory elements of the current course, which would also take us further away from the long-cherished theory that newly qualified solicitors should be prepared to work in any legal practice.

The Legal Services Institute suggests that LPC students should qualify after finishing their studies, but would need further qualifications if they wanted to undertake reserved legal activities. It argues that training all would-be solicitors to undertake the small number of reserved activities – which in reality many of them will never handle – makes the regime inflexible. "A process which aims to equip a solicitor, at the point of admission, to be equally competent as a corporate lawyer in a 'magic circle' firm, or as a general practitioner in a small high street firm, is in danger of producing a lawyer whose skills are less than adequate for either role," it says.

Then there could be common training focused on being able to perform a particular activity, regardless of educational background. Baroness Ruth Deech, chairwoman of the Bar Standards Board, wants to merge the LPC and bar professional training course into a common postgraduate diploma or masters degree to discourage students from specialising too early.

One development that seems likely is a greater focus on ethics training. Edmonds highlighted its importance, while the Law Society last week said it should be compulsory in the undergraduate law degree – all rather begging the question of why it has not been to date.

Frustratingly, it will be two years before we get the result of the joint review, although we are promised important policy findings along the way. But then again, when I think back to my own legal studies, a fitfully interesting degree followed by a year of sheer tedium at law school for the old Law Society Finals, it is more important to get this right, than to do it quick.